SENATE 


74th Congress'! 
2d Session ) 


/Document 
I No. 264 



MODERN MIRACLE MEN 


AN ARTICLE 



i * 


ENTITLED “MODERN MIRACLE MEN”, RELATING TO 
PROPER FOOD MINERAL BALANCES BY 
DR. CHARLES NORTHEN, REPRINTED FROM 
COSMOPOLITAN, JUNE 1936 



PRESENTED BY MR. FLETCHER 
June 1 (calendar day, June 5), 1936.—Ordered to be printed 


3 4-'2- t 9^7 

UNITED STATES 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 
WASHINGTON : 1936 

Monograph 















;ary of congress 

JUN 24 1936 

01 VISION OF DOCUMENTS 















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MODERN MIRACLE MEN 

DR. CHARLES NORTHEN, WHO BUILDS HEALTH FROM THE 

GROUND UP 

This quiet, unhallyhooed pioneer and genius in the field of nutrition 
demonstrates that countless human ills stem from the fact that impov¬ 
erished soil of America no longer provides plant foods with the miner a 1 
elements essential to human nourishment and health! To overcome 
this alarming condition, he doctors sick soils and, by seeming miracles, 
raises truly healthy and health-giving f ruits and vegetables 


(By Rex Beach) 


Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain 
dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until the 
depleted^ soils from which our foods come are brought into proper 
mineral balance? 

The alarming fact is that foods—fruits and vegetables and grains— 
now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contains 
enough of certain needed minerals, are starving us—no matter how 
much of them we eat! 

This talk about minerals is novel and quite startling. In fact, a 
realization of the importance of minerals in food is so new that the 
textbooks on nutritional dietetics contain very little about it. Never¬ 
theless, it is something that concerns all of us, and the further we 
delve into it the more startling it becomes. 

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a carrot is a carrot—that one is 
about as good as another as far as nourishment is concerned? But 
it isn’t; one carrot may look and taste like another and yet be lacking 
in the particular mineral element which our system requires and 
which carrots are supposed to contain. Laboratory tests prove 
that the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the eggs and even the milk 
and the meats of today are not what they were a few generations ago. 
(Which doubtless explains why our forefathers thrived on a selection 
of foods that would starve us!) No man of today can eat enough 
fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the mineral salts 
he requires for perfect health, because his stomach isn’t big enough 
to hold them! And we are running to big stomachs. 

No longer does a balanced and fully nourishing diet consist merely 
of so many calories or certain vitamins or a fixed proportion of 
starches, proteins, and carbohydrates. We now know that it must 
contain, in addition, something like a score of mineral salts. 

It is bad news to learn from our leading authorities that 99 percent 
of the American people are deficient in these minerals, and that a marked 
deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in 
disease. Any upset of the balance, any considerable lack of one or 
another element, however microscopic the body requirement may be, 
and we sicken, suffer, shorten our lives. 


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MODERN MIRACLE MEN 


This discovery is one of the latest and most important contributions 
of science to the problem of human health. 

So far as the records go, the first man in this field of research, the 
first to demonstrate that most human foods of our day are poor in 
minerals and that their proportions are not balanced, was Dr. Charles 
Nor then, an Alabama physician now living at Orlando, Fla. His 
discoveries and achievements are of enormous importance to mankind. 

Following a wide experience in general practice, Dr. Northen 
specialized in stomach diseases and nutritional disorders. Later, he 
moved to New York and made extensive studies along this line, in 
conjunction with a famous French scientist from the Sorbonne. In 
the course of that work he convinced himself that there was little 
authentic, definite information on the chemistry of foods, and that 
no dependence could be placed on existing data. 

He asked himself how foods could be used intelligently in the 
treatment of disease, when they differed so widely in content. The 
answer seemed to be that they could not be used intelligently. In 
establishing the fact that serious deficiencies existed and in searching 
out the reasons therefor, he made an extensive study of the soil. It 
was he who first voiced the surprising assertion that we must make soil 
building the basis of food building in order to accomplish human 
building. 

“Bear in mind,” says Dr. Northen, “that minerals are vital to 
human metabolism and health—and that no plant or animal can 
appropriate to itself any mineral which is not present in the soil 
upon which it feeds. 

“When I first made this statement I was ridiculed, for up to that 
time people had paid little attention to food deficiencies and even 
less to soil deficiencies. Men eminent in medicine denied there was 
any such thing as vegetables and fruits that did not contain sufficient 
minerals for human needs. Eminent agricultural authorities insisted 
that all soil contained all necessary minerals. They reasoned that 
plants take what they need, and that it is the function of the human 
body to appropriate what it requires. Failure to do so, they said, 
was a symptom of disorder. 

“Some of our respected authorities even claimed that the so-called 
secondary minerals played no part whatever in human health. It is 
only recently that such men as Dr. McCollum of Johns Hopkins, 
Dr. Mendel of Yale, Dr. Sherman of Columbia, Dr. Lipman of Rutgers, 
and Drs. H. G. Knight and Oswald Schreiner of the United States 
Department of Agriculture "have agreed "that these minerals are 
essential to plant, animal, and human feeding. 

“We know that vitamins are complex chemical substances which 
are indispensable to nutrition, and that each of them is of importance 
for the normal function of some special structure in the body. Dis¬ 
order and disease result from any vitamin deficiency. 

“It is not commonly realized, however, that vitamins control the 
body’s appropriation of minerals, and in the absence of minerals they 
have no function to perform. Lacking vitamins, the system can 
make some use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless. 

“Neither does the layman realize that there may be a pronounced 
difference in both foods and soils—to him one vegetable, one glass of 
milk, or one egg is about the same as another. Dirt is dirt, too, and 



MODERN MIRACLE MEN 3 

he assumes that by adding a little fertilizer to it, a satisfactory vege¬ 
table or fruit can be grown. 

“The truth is that our foods vary enormously in value, and some 
of them aren’t worth eating, as food. For example, vegetation 
grown in one part of the country may assay 1,100 parts, per billion, 
of iodine, as against 20 in that grown elsewhere. Processed milk 
has run anywhere from 362 parts, per million, of iodine and 127 of 
iron, down to nothing. 

“Some of our lands, even in a virgin state, never were well balanced 
in mineral content, and unhappily for us, we have been systematically 
robbing the poor soils and the good soils alike of the very substances 
most necessary to health, growth, long life, and resistance to disease. 
Up to the time I began experimenting, almost nothing had been done 
to make good the theft. 

“The more I studied nutritional problems and the effects of mineral 
deficiencies upon disease, the more plainly I saw that here lay the 
most direct approach to better health, and the more important it 
became in my mind to find a method of restoring those missing 
minerals to our foods. 

“The subject interested me so profoundly that I retired from 
active medical practice and for a good many years now I have devoted 
myself to it. It’s a fascinating subject, for it goes to the heart of 
human betterment.” 

The results obtained by Dr. Northen are outstanding. By putting 
back into foods the stuff that foods are made of, he has proved himself 
to be a real miracle man of medicine, for he has opened up the shortest 
and most rational route to better health. 

He showed first that it should be done, and then that it could be done. 

He doubled and redoubled the natural mineral content of fruits and 
vegetables. 

He improved the quality of milk by increasing the iron and the iodine 
in it. 

He caused hens to lay eggs richer in the vital elements. 

By scientific soil feeding, he raised better seed potatoes in Maine, 
better grapes in California, better oranges in Florida and better field 
crops in other States. (By “better” is meant not only an improve¬ 
ment in food value but also an increase in quality and quantity.) 

Before going further into the results he has obtained, let’s see just 
what is involved in this matter of “mineral deficiencies”, what it may 
mean to our health, and how it may affect the growth and develop¬ 
ment, both mental and physical, of our children. 

We know that rats, guinea pigs, and other animals can be fed into 
a diseased condition and out again by controlling only the minerals in 
their food. 

A 10-year test with rats proved that by withholding calcium they 
can be bred down to a third the size of those fed with an adequate 
amount of that mineral. Their intelligence, too, can be controlled 
by mineral feeding as readily as can their size, their bony structure, 
and their general health. 

Place a number of these little animals inside a maze after starving 
some of them in a certain mineral element. The starved ones will be 
unable to find their way out, whereas the others will have little or no 
difficulty in getting out. Their dispositions can be altered by mineral 


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MODERN MIRACLE MEN 


feeding. They can be made quarrelsome and belligerent; they can 
even be turned into cannibals and be made to devour each other. 

A cageful of normal rats will live in amity. Restrict their calcium, 
and they will become irritable and draw apart from one another. 
Then they will begin to fight. Restore their calcium balance and they 
will grow more friendly; in time they will begin to sleep in a pile as 
before. 

Many backward children are “stupid” merely because they are 
deficient in magnesia. We punish them for our failure to feed them 
properly. 

Certainly our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon 
the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins 
or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein, or carbohydrates 
we consume. 

It is now agreed that at least 16 mineral elements are indispensable 
jor normal nutrition , and several more are always found in small 
amounts in the body, although their precise physiological role has 
not been determined. Of the 11 indispensable salts, calcium, phos¬ 
phorus, and iron are perhaps the most important. 

Calcium is the dominant nerve controller; it powerfully affects the 
cell formation of all living things and regulates nerve action. It 
governs contractility of the muscles and the rhythmic beat of the 
heart. It also coordinates the other mineral elements and corrects 
disturbances made by them. It works only in sunlight. Vitamin ID 
is its buddy. 

Dr. Sherman of Columbia asserts that 50 percent of the American 
people are starving for calcium. A recent article in the Journal of the 
American Medical Association stated that out of 4,000 cases in New 
York Hospital, only 2 were not suffering from a lack of calcium. 

What does such a deficiency mean? How would it affect your 
health or mine? So many morbid conditions and actual diseases may 
result that it is almost hopeless to catalog them. Included in the 
list are rickets, bony deformities, bad teeth, nervous disorders, re¬ 
duced resistance to other diseases, fatigability, and behavior distrub- 
ances such as incorrigibility, assaultiveness, nonadaptability. 

Here’s one specific example: The soil around a certain Midwest 
city is poor in calcium. Three hundred children of this community 
were examined and nearly 90 percent had bad teeth, 69 percent showed 
affections of the nose and throat, swollen glands, enlarged or diseased 
tonsils, More than one-third had defective vision, round shoulders, 
bow legs, and anemia. 

Calcium and phosphorus appear to pull in double harness. A child 
requires as much per day as two grown men, but studies indicate a 
common deficiency of both in our food. Researches on farm animals 
point to a deficiency of one or the other as the cause of serious losses 
to the farmers, and when the soil is poor in phosphorus these animals 
become bone-chewers. Dr. McCollum says that when there are 
enough phosphates in the blood there can be no dental decay. 

Iron is an essential constituent of the oxygen-carrying pigment of 
the blood: iron starvation results in anemia, and yet iron cannot be 
assimilated unless some copper is contained in the diet. In Florida 
many cattle die from an obscure disease called “salt sickness.” It 
has been found to arise from a lack of iron and copper in the soil and 
hence in the grass. A man may starve for want of these elements 
just as a beef “critter” starves. 


MODERN MIRACLE MEN 


5 


If iodine is not present in our foods the function of the thyroid gland 
is disturbed and goiter afflicts us. The human body requires only 
fourteen-thousandths of a milligram daily, yet we have a distinct 
“goiter belt” in the Great Lakes section, and in parts of the North¬ 
west the soil is so poor in iodine that the disease is common. 

So it goes, down through the list, each mineral element playing a 
definite role in nutrition. A characteristic set of symptoms, just as 
specific as any vitamin-deficiency disease, follows a deficiency in any 
one of them. It is alarming, therefore, to face the fact that we are 
starving for these precious, health-giving substances. 

Very well, you say, if our foods are poor in the mineral salts they 
are supposed to contain, why not resort to dosing? 

That is precisely what is being done, or being attempted. However, 
those who should know assert that the human system cannot appro¬ 
priate those elements to the best advantage in any but the food form. 
At best, only a part of them in the form of drugs can be utilized by 
the body, and certain dietitians go so far as to say it is a waste of effort 
to fool with them. Calcium, for instance, cannot be supplied in any 
form of medication with lasting effect. 

But there is a more potent reason why the curing of diet deficiencies 
by drugging hasn’t worked out so well. Consider those 16 indispensa- 
ble elements and those others which presumably perform some obscure 
function as yet undetermined. Aside from calcium and phosphorus, 
they are needed only in infinitesimal quantities, and the activity of 
one may be dependent upon the presence of another. To determine 
the precise requirements of each individual case and to attempt to 
weigh it out on a druggist’s scales would appear hopeless. 

It is a problem and a serious one. But here is the hopeful side of 
the picture: Nature can and will solve it ij she is encouraged to do so. 
The minerals in fruit and vegetables are colloidal; i. e., they are in a 
state of such extremely fine suspension that they can be assimilated by 
the human system: It is merely a question of giving back to nature the 
materials with which she works. 

We must rebuild our soils: Put back the minerals we have taken out. 
That sounds difficult but it isn’t. Neither is it expensive. Therein 
lies the short cut to better health and longer life. 

When Dr. Northen first asserted that many foods were lacking in 
mineral content and that this deficiency was due solely to an absence 
of those elements in the soil, his findings were challenged and he was 
called a crank. But differences of opinion in the medical profession 
are not uncommon—it was only 60 years ago that the Medical Society 
of Boston passed a resolution condemning the use of bathtubs—and 
he persisted in his assertion that inasmuch as foods did not contain 
what they were supposed to contain, no physician could with certainty 
prescribe a diet to overcome physical ills. 

He showed that the textbooks are not dependable because many 
of the analyses in them were made many years ago, perhaps from 
products raised in virgin soils, whereas our soils have been constantly 
depleted. Soil analyses, he pointed out, reflect only the content of 
samples. One analysis may be entirely different from another made 
10 miles away. 

“And so what?” came the query. 

Dr. Northen undertook to demonstrate that something could be 
done about it. By reestablishing a proper soil balance he actually grew 
crops that contained an ample amount of the desired minerals. 


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MODERN MIRACLE MEN 


This was incredible. It was contrary to the books and it upset 
everything connected with diet practice. The scoffers began to pay 
attention to him. Recently the Southern Medical Association, real¬ 
izing the hopelessness of trying to remedy nutritional deficiencies 
without positive factors to work with, recommended a careful study 
to determine the real mineral content of foodstuffs and the variations 
due to soil depletion in different localities. These progressive medical 
men are awake to the importance of prevention. 

Dr. Northen went even further and proved that crops grown in a 
properly mineralized soil were bigger and better; that seeds germinated 
quicker, grew more rapidly and made larger plants; that trees were 
healthier and put on more fruit of better quality. 

By increasing the mineral content of citrus fruit he likewise im¬ 
proved its texture, its appearance and its flavor. 

He experimented with a variety of growing things, and in every 
case the story was the same. By mineralizing the feed at poultry 
farms, he got more and better eggs; by balancing pasture soils, he 
produced richer milk. Persistently he hammered home to farmers, to 
doctors, and to the general public the thought that life depends upon 
the minerals. 

His work led him into a careful study of the effects of climate, 
sunlight, ultraviolet and thermal rays upon plant, animal, and human 
hygiene. In consequence he moved to Florida. People familiar 
with his work consider him the most valuable man in the State. I 
met him by reason of the fact that I was harassed by certain soil 
problems on my Florida farm which had baffled the best chemists 
and fertilizer experts available. 

He is an elderly, retiring man, with a warm smile and an engaging 
personality. He is a trifle shy until he opens up on his pet topic; 
then his diffidence disappears and he speaks with authority. His 
mind is a storehouse crammed with precise, scientific data about soil 
and food chemistry, the complicated life processes of plants, animals, 
and human beings—and the effect of malnutrition upon all three. 
He is perhaps as close to the secret of life as any man anywhere. 

“Do you call yourself a soil or a food chemist?’’ I inquired. 

“Neither. I’manM.D. My work lies in the field of biochemistry 
and nutrition. I gave up medicine because this is a wider and a more 
important work. Sick soils mean sick plants, sick animals, and sick 
people. Physical, mental, and moral fitness depends largely upon an 
ample supply and a proper proportion of the minerals in our foods. 
Nerve function, nerve stability, nerve cell-building likewise depend 
thereon. I'm really a doctor of sick soils.” 

“Do you mean to imply that the vegetables I'm raising on my farm 
are sick?" I asked. 

“Precisely! They’re as weak and undernourished as anemic 
children. They’re not much good as food. Look at the pests and 
the diseases that plague them. Insecticides cost farmers nearly as 
much as fertilizer these days. 

“A healthy plant, however, grown in soil properly balanced, can and 
will resist most insect pests. That very characteristic makes it a 
better food product. You have tuberculosis and pneumonia germs 
in your system but you’re strong enough to throw them off. Simi¬ 
larly, a really healthy plant will pretty nearly take care of itself in 


MODERN MIRACLE MEN 


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the battle against insects and blights—and will also give the human 
system what ijb requires.” 

“Good heavens! Do you realize what that means to agriculture?” 

“Perfectly. Enormous savings. Better crops. Lowered living 
costs to the rest of us. But I'm not so much interested in agriculture 
as in health.” 

“It sounds beautifully theoretical and utterly impractical to me,” 
I told the doctor, whereupon he gave me some of his case records. 

For instance, in an orange grove infested with scale, when he 
restored the mineral balance to part of the soil, the trees growing in 
that part became clean while the rest remained diseased. By the 
same means he had grown healthy rosebushes between rows that 
were riddled by insects. > , 

He had grown tomato and cucumber plants, both healthy and 
diseased, where the vines intertwined. The bugs ate up the diseased 
and refused to touch the healthy plants! He showed me interesting 
analyses of citrus fruit, the chemistry and the food value of which 
accurately reflected the soil treatment the trees had received.» 

There is no space here to go fully into Dr. Northen’s work but it- 
is of such importance as to rank with that of Burbank, the plant 
wizard, and with that of our famous physiologists and nutritional 
experts. 

“Healthy plants mean healthy people”, said he. “We can’t raise 
a strong race on a weak soil. Why don’t you try mending the defi¬ 
ciencies on your farm and growing more minerals into your crops?” 

I did try and I succeeded. I was planting a large acreage of 
celery and under Dr. Nor then’s direction I fed minerals into certain 
blocks of the land in varying amounts. When the plants from this 
soil were mature I had them analyzed, along with celery from other 
parts of the State. It was the most careful and comprehensive 
study of the kind ever made, and it included over 250 separate 
chemical determinations. I was amazed to learn that my celery 
had more than twice the mineral content of the best grown elsewhere. 
Furthermore, it kept much better, with and without refrigeration, 
proving that the cell structure was sounder. 

In 1927, Mr. W. W. Kincaid, a “gentleman farmer” of Niagara 
Falls, heard an address by Dr. Northen and was so impressed that 
he began extensive experiments in the mineral feeding of plants and 
animals. The results he has accomplished are conspicuous. He set 
himself the task of increasing the iodine in the milk from his dairy 
herd. He has succeeded in adding both iodine and iron so liberally 
that one glass of his milk contains all of these minerals that an adult 
man requires for a day. 

Is this significant? Listen to these incredible figures taken from 
a bulletin of the South Carolina Food Research Commission: “In 
many sections three out of jive persons have goiter and a recent esti¬ 
mate states that 30 million people in the United States suffer from it.” 

Foods rich in iodine are of the greatest importance to these 
sufferers. 

Mr. Kincaid took a brown Swiss heifer calf which was dropped in 
the stockyards, and by raising her on mineralized pasturage and a 
properly balanced diet made her the third all-time champion of her 
breed! In one season she gave 21,924 pounds of milk. He raised 


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MODERN MIRACLE MEN 


her butterfat production from 410 pounds in 1 year to 1,037 pounds. 
Results like these are of incalculable importance. 

Others besides Mr. Kincaid are following the trail Dr. N or then 
blazed. Similar experiments with milk have been made in Illinois 
and nearly every fertilizer company is beginning to urge use of the 
rare mineral elements. As an example I quote from statements of a 
subsidiary of one of the leading copper companies: 

Many States show a marked reduction in the productive capacity of the soil 
* * * in many districts amounting to a 25 to 50 percent reduction in the last 

50 years * * *. Some areas show a tenfold variation in calcium. Some 

show a sixtyfold variation in phosphorus * * *. Authorities * * * see 

soil depletion, barren livestock, increased human death rate due to heart disease, 
deformities, arthritis, increased dental caries, all due to lack of essential minerals 
in plant foods. 

“It is neither a complicated nor an expensive undertaking to restore 
our soils to balance and thereby work a real miracle in the control of 
disease,” says Dr. Northern “As a matter of fact, it’s a money¬ 
making move for the farmer, and any competent soil chemist can tell 
him how to proceed. 

“First determine by analysis the precise chemistry of any given 
soil, then correct the deficiencies by putting down enough of the miss¬ 
ing elements to restore its balance. The same care should be used as 
in prescribing for a sick patient, for proportions are oj vital importance. 

“In my early experiments I found it extremely difficult to get the 
variety of minerals needed in the form in which I wanted to use them 
but advancement in chemistry, and expecially our ever-increasing 
knowledge of colloidal chemistry, has solved that difficulty. It is now 
possible, by the use of minerals in colloidal form, to prescribe a cheap 
and effective system of soil correction which meets this vital need and 
one which fits in admirably with nature’s plans. 

“Soils seriously deficient in minerals cannot produce plant life com¬ 
petent to maintain our needs, and with the continuous cropping and 
shipping away of those concentrates, the condition becomes worse. 

“A famous nutrition authority recently said, ‘One sure way to end 
the American people’s susceptibility to infection is to supply through 
food a balanced ration or iron, copper, and other metals. An organ¬ 
ism supplied with a diet adequate to, or preferably in excess of, all 
mineral requirements may so utilize these elements as to produce 
immunity from infection quite beyond anything we are able to produce 
artificially by our present method of immunization. You can’t make 
up the deficiency by using patent medicine.’ 

“He’s absolutely right. Prevention of disease is easier, more prac¬ 
tical, and more economical than cure, but not until foods are standard¬ 
ized on a basis of what they contain instead of what they look like can 
the dietitian prescribe them with intelligence and with effect. 

“There was a time when medical therapy had no standards because 
the therapeutic elements in drugs had not been definitely determined 
on a chemical basis. Pharmaceutical houses have changed all that. 
Food chemistry, on the other hand, has depended almost entirely 
upon governmental agencies for its research, and in our real knowledge 
of values we are about where medicine was a century ago. 

“Disease preys most surely and most viciously on the undernour¬ 
ished and unfit plants, animals, and human beings alike, and when the 
importance of these obscure mineral elements is fully realized the 


MODERN MIRACLE MEN 


9 


chemistry of life will have to be rewritten. No man knows his mental 
or bodily capacity, how well he can feel or how long he can live, for 
we are all cripples and weaklings. It is a disgrace to science. Hap¬ 
pily, that chemistry is being rewritten and we’re on our way to better 
health by returning to the soil the things we have stolen from it. 

“The public can help; it can hasten the change. How? By demand¬ 
ing quality in its food. By insisting that our doctors and our health 
departments establish scientific standards of nutritional value. 

“The growers will quickly respond. They can put back those 
minerals almost overnight, and by doing so they can actually make 
money through bigger and better crops. 

“It is simpler to cure sick soils than sick people—which shall we 
choose?” 


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